by Elias Khoury
The confusion surrounding his origins would reverberate throughout his story as a poet. This began when he fell prey to passion and became enamored of Rawda, but this love for her and the madness to which it drove him were not the end of it, as another woman would appear in his life and make of his death a mirror of the confusion that perplexed both chroniclers and critics.
From the moment the ruler gave the youth who had been known as Abd al-Rahman ibn Ismail the name Waddah al-Yaman, his life changed and he came to have two names, a name for oblivion and a name for remembrance: Abd al-Rahman was forgotten and he became Waddah. Legends were woven around his beauty, one of which claims that for fear of its disruptive effect on women, he used to go about wearing a mask.
Said the chronicler: “Waddah al-Yaman, as well as the Masked Man of Kinda, and Abu Zubayd al-Ta’i, used to attend the festivals of the Arabs wearing masks, covering their faces for fear of the evil eye and to guard themselves – they were so beautiful – against the women.”
The story began when the young man tore off his mask and stood at the edge of a brook, drinking in with his eyes a beauty that presented itself to him as the image, reflected in water, of a young woman, who looked, as she gathered up the skirts of her dress to reveal legs like marble, like some nymph emerging from the stream and carrying in her eyes the tremulous shadows made upon its surface by a ben tree.
Rawda, a girl of sixteen, belonged to the Kinda, tribe of the kings of the Arabs, from which came Imru’ al-Qays, greatest of the poets of the Arabic language. The girl raised her skirts and put her feet in the water. When the poet noticed her, he tore off his mask and stood spellbound by the magic of her beauty.
Love stories usually elide the beginning at the very time that they pretend to recount it. What the chroniclers fail to mention is that Waddah al-Yaman’s mask fell from his face when he ran toward the image of the girl reflected in the water. He reached the brook, bent to drink, and the girl had no choice but to withdraw and take refuge in the shadows of the ben tree. As the water rose in his hands toward his mouth, he noticed that the girl didn’t rise with it, so he turned around, but he couldn’t see her, so he sat down at the edge of the brook to wait.
Probably the girl rebuked him and asked him to leave, so he asked her to appear so that he could see her. He said he was Waddah al-Yaman and that his mask had fallen off because of her, and he asked her to come forward so that he might see her, but she refused. Indeed, she reviled him for his impertinence, and so on and so forth.
The first encounter was one of vituperation, and not, as the poets would have it, of epiphany. The girl wasn’t bowled over by Waddah’s beauty and paid no attention to his beautiful words. She emerged from her hiding place and looked at him with the contempt of a woman who knows she has before her a man who has built his reputation on his attractiveness, and she said he was not as beautiful as she had expected and left.
(Note: The first encounter between Waddah and Rawda resembles that of another Omayyad poet and his beloved. Jamil ibn Maamar, who took his beloved’s name as his second and became known as Jamil-Buthayna, refers to his first encounter with her in terms of a quarrel that reached the point of insult:
The first thing that led to affection between us
at Wadi Baghid, dear Buthayna, was an altercation –
We made some comment and she answered right back –
for every query, dear Buthayna, has its refutation.
This similarity puzzles the critics as it implies that what is passed down is not a factual report but a text containing a good measure of imagination and depending on the replication of a ready-made formula. Though, in my opinion, it confirms the importance of the fictional story, its superiority to the factual report, and its ability to convey the diversity of human experience – unlike the facts, which pale in comparison and may have no significance worth mentioning, though that’s something else I don’t want to get into now.)
Returning to my poet, I must tell you that his first encounter with Rawda took place at the Yemeni village of al-Khasib, in an area known for its abundance of water, verdant plains, and fields of wild flowers scattered here and there. It is said, though only God knows, that Waddah felt the tingle of poetry fermenting in his veins and wrote numerous verses but didn’t dare to recite them publicly because the poetry was as yet only incompletely formed in his heart and mind, and that the demon, or spirit-companion, or fairy, of poetry that dictates to poets their verses had yet to appear to him. (That was what people thought then, and the poets believed in and took to waiting for their fairies to turn up and shape the meanings and music inside them.) So he went to al-Khasib in search of his absent spirit-companion and sat down in the shade of a ben tree, shaded in turn by a holm oak, to wait for it, the water of the brook before him reflecting in its mirrors the colors of the land; and that was where he saw her and that was where he bent over the water to drink her reflected shadow.
That day, the beautiful Himyarite youth became a poet, and that day he drew his beloved with words.
The young man returned to the brook the next day and saw her again, as though she were waiting for him, and recited to her his first ode, which became his path to the Kindite girl’s heart, and the story began.
Like all lovers’ stories of the period, it was loaded onto the poem’s back, for verse isn’t just the Arabs’ collected poetical works, it is also the repository of their legends. Without it, there are no stories, and without the stories, the poetry withers and dies away.
Now begins the tragedy, for Rawda’s parents weren’t simply hostile to the poet, they actually married their daughter off to another man. And the story doesn’t end there: the marriage to an older man brought about Rawda’s death in that appalling fashion and led the poet to lose his wits.
Waddah drew a picture of Rawda in his verse. She was full breasted, pure of mien, polished of forehead (the latter embellished with blond hair the color of the tail of a palomino), her eyebrows perfectly arched, her eyes as dark as night, her nose chiseled, her arms plump, her hands soft, her waist narrow…a sixteen-year-old girl, forced to marry a man of sixty and be his fourth wife – the final stop on the itinerary of his pleasures before pleasure itself dried up and the stooped body fell apart.
Before the marriage, the poet had believed that the story was the truth and that it had swathed him in the character of Antara al-Absi, the poet and knight who fought to reach his beloved, Abla, and whose sword was his sign, his verse his new lineage – a poet who was a slave turned, by virtue of his verse, into a lord and a lord turned into a knight, the poet’s dark skin, once a barrier between him and the lords of his tribe, becoming his mark of distinction, his blackness a foil for the whiteness of his blade.
Waddah believed the story. He was the slim youth who had encountered his beloved, after which they would pick wildflowers and gather truffles, which he would grill for her, and he would drink to her health and suck the wildflowers from her lips while declaiming poetry to her about his love.
Rawda passed a message to him that her seven brothers had shut her away, that his poetry, which had achieved worldwide fame, had made her an object of scandal, and that she feared for him:
“Don’t hang around our house!” said she –
“A jealous man is my father.”
Said I, “Then I’ll wait for a moment of inadvertence,
and my sword is resolute, a hacker.”
Said she, “Around me next are seven brothers.”
Said I, “I am a conqueror, an overcomer.”
Said she, “You’ve exhausted all our arguments!
Come, then, when sleeps the night reveler
And fall upon us as falls the dew
on a night when there’s no proscriber and no scolder.”
Rawda listened to his poem and was intoxicated. She watched as the poetry of this Waddah transformed itself
into a robe for her woven from the silk of words, and she put it on and it became her second body, and instead of telling him not to come because her brothers were getting ready to kill him, she made an arrangement with him to come the evening of that very day and told him she’d be waiting for him in her tent. All he had to do was creep into the encampment by night and she would come out to him.
The lovers believed the poetry and called the truth a lie!
That night, Waddah al-Yaman fell into an ambush set by the seven brothers. When the poet found himself within death’s grasp, he tugged on his horse’s reins and decided to flee, at which point he heard a ringing laugh and a voice asking him sarcastically about the “hacker” of a sword that the poet had mentioned in his poem, which was now on everyone’s lips and tongue. The poet then turned back, realizing that his verse had killed him, a swift violent battle left him prostrate in the desert, moaning in his blood.
The story says that Abu Zubayd al-Ta’i passed the poet as he lay dying and took him on his mount to his people, where he stayed for a year, bedridden, suffering bouts of fever in which he beheld the phantom of his beloved, slain at the hands of the seven brothers, the blood pouring from her every part.
When the fever left him, the wound to his belly had healed over, and he was cured, he discovered that the fever’s nightmares had been less cruel than the reality of his healed state. They told him Rawda had been married off to an older man who had, it seemed, concealed from her family that he was a leper, and that the husband had died a few days after the marriage. Rawda, though, had been afflicted with the accursed disease and her family had thrown her into the lepers’ valley, where the sick live in total isolation, receiving only crumbs of food donated by well-doers and waiting to die while suffering bodily torment and spiritual anguish.
Waddah didn’t write any verses about his visit to his beloved in the lepers’ valley. He mentioned that he visited her but didn’t mention what he saw or what she said to him or he to her. All we know about the visit is that, on his return, the poet tore his clothes, rolled in the dust, and went mad, and that he stopped writing poetry.
Said the chronicler: “Several Yemeni men familiar with the story of Waddah and Rawda told me that Waddah was on a journey with his friends and that along the way he asked them to halt and for a while left the path they were on, then came back to them in tears. They asked him what was wrong and he said, ‘I turned from the path to see Rawda, and found that she had become a leper and had been thrown out of her village. So I did what I could to help her and gave her some of my money,’ and he started weeping out of sorrow for her.”
In another version of the report, the poet recovered from his wounds a year after taking to his bed and left for the area of al-Khasib in search of his beloved. On the way there, a company of people saw him and told him Rawda had been stricken with leprosy and thrown into the lepers’ valley, so he went there in search of her, declaiming:
O Rawda of Waddah, O best of Rawdas,
for your family, should they bestow on us a place to stay,
Your ransom is a Waddah whom you drove mad –
so, if you wish to cure, then cure, and if you wish to slay, then slay.
The poet reached the valley only to be taken aback when he found his resolve giving way. He’d gone to Rawda with the resolve of a knight, intending to die with her. He’d made a decision: he would vanquish death with his love. But when he saw her and how the light in those beautiful eyes had gone dead, how her skin peeled and her eyebrows sagged, he was overtaken by fear, his chivalry evaporated, and he felt a desire to flee. Rawda approached him, holding out her arms and moaning softly, so he took some money from his pocket, threw it at her, and began to back away. The woman, skin peeling, body wasted, stretched out her arms to the man standing in front of her as though she wanted to fly, but instead of flying she fell to the earth. She covered her face with her hands and her head began swaying from side to side, as though she wanted to speak but couldn’t.
The woman didn’t bend down to pick up the money. She let her beloved retreat and sat down on the ground, then dismissed him with a gesture of her hand.
The chronicler doesn’t say what the poet said about his trip to see his beloved nor how he’d fled the place at a run, flinging his love for her aside out of fear of death, escaping his love to save his own life.
Thereafter, the poet ceased to be Waddah of Yaman and became Waddah the Madman, lost in the wastelands, eating weeds and sleeping under the open sky. The beautiful young man’s mask became a token of his fear of himself and of others. All that was left of the love were the poems, and of the passion the memories, which putrefied like the body of a leper.
The only hope of the poet’s escaping his wilderness and his ever-deeper descent into incoherence and insanity lay in his urge to make the pilgrimage to God’s Holy House in Mecca, to make the circum-ambulation and to throw the stones, and thereby perhaps reclaim his soul from the devil that now dwelled in him.
When I read this story, as told in Arabic literature, I thought that the story of Waddah and Rawda was a retelling of the story of Qays, or “Mad-over-Layla,” the parents of whose beloved refused to let him marry her because he’d written about her in poems, a refusal that drove him to insanity, for which he attempted to find a cure by making the pilgrimage to Mecca. However, I was wrong.
The error arose from the chronicler’s neglect of what befell the poet when he met his beloved in the lepers’ valley. This neglect was deliberate, as what actually happened disturbs the schema of the victim-lover, transformed into a source for an oral heritage that tells how love leads to the death, or madness, of lovers.
Waddah al-Yaman’s madness reveals another face of insanity, that which is brought about by fear of the consequences of love, or fear of life, which is another name for fear of death.
Love ends in madness. Despite this, madness, or the attempt to cure it by making pilgrimage and praying, ushers in the beginning of a new chapter in the story of Waddah al-Yaman.
Confusions over the Name
(POINT OF ENTRY 4)
SAID THE CHRONICLER: “Umm al-Banin, daughter of Abd al-Aziz ibn Marwan, asked permission of her husband the caliph al-Walid ibn Abd al-Malik to make the pilgrimage to Mecca and he granted it, he being then the caliph, she his wife. She arrived, bringing with her slave girls of a beauty never before seen, and al-Walid wrote threatening all poets with dire consequences should any of them mention her name or that of anyone in her entourage. She arrived and was seen by the people, and the philanderers and poets came out to see her, and her eye fell on Waddah al-Yaman, and she fell in love.”
What occurred between this woman and the poet aimlessly wandering about Mecca, skin and bones, a phantom, his glances unfocused as though he could not see, his lips cracked from thirst, forever bursting into prayer, falling to the ground, heavily rising again and looking about him as though fearful of the wraiths of love that pursued him, the words crumbling on his lips like Rawda’s flaking, leprous skin?
And what could this woman have hoped to gain by dallying with poetry and poets?
It is said, though God alone knows, that Umm al-Banin wanted to play the game of love-through-poetry, as was the fashion among noble-born women of Quraysh at the time, and to feel that she’d entered the annals of the Arabs in the form of an ode written in praise of her beauty. She hoped the poets would write erotic verse about her as they had about her sister-in-law Fatima, daughter of Abd al-Malik and wife of Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz, and about Sakina, daughter of al-Husein, and as they did about every noble-born Arab woman. She therefore asked Kuthayyir-Azza and Waddah al-Yaman to mention her in their verse. Kuthayyir was scared and wrote instead of one of her slave girls, whose name was Ghadira. The verses of Waddah al-Yaman, however, became his shroud, and another door leading to his tragedy.
The new story began frivolously and ended tragically according to Ibn Hazm.
The frivolity of the caliph’s wife, who took the game to its outer limits, while tragedy was the lot of our poet, who awoke from the daze of his madness into a yet greater daze, entering with this woman into the labyrinth of the name.
The story says that Umm al-Banin had first wanted Kuthayyir-Azza, a poet celebrated for his love of a woman called Azza, which had transported him to such an extreme of lovelornness that he’d abandoned his own name and taken that of his beloved. He followed her to Egypt, where she lived with her husband, finding expression for his love by walking in her footsteps.
The caliph’s wife had learned by heart a poem of Kuthayyir’s in which he speaks of his beloved as though she were divine –
Were they to hear Azza, as I have, speaking,
they’d drop to their knees before her in prostration –
and she asked the poet to deify her too. The poet to whom this line is attributed stood before Umm al-Banin, shaking with fear.
He told her that he didn’t dare, and she replied that she couldn’t believe it. He said he feared the caliph’s wrath and had no desire to purchase death with a poem.
No, that’s not how it went.
The story says that Kuthayyir was famous for his ugliness – a short man with a hideous face, and stupid – and people used to make fun of him. Azza fled from him, their affair was purely the fruit of his imagination. Umm al-Banin had first been drawn to him for the purity of his style and his expressive power, yet when the slave girl Ghadira brought him to her, she was revolted by his ugliness and refused to remove her veil.
Kuthayyir begged her to be excused from the assignment, because the two lines he’d compose for her would cost him his life. The woman got on her high horse and said he was a liar and the chroniclers of his verse were liars too, because it was Waddah al-Yaman who had deified his beloved and Kuthayyir had simply stolen al-Waddah’s poem and changed Rawda’s name to Azza’s. Then she drove him from her parlor.